CRUD Operations | Züs Weekly Debrief (October 27, 2021)

Recap

Another exciting week for Züs as we participate in Huawei Cloud x Morpheus Labs conference on Thursday. In addition, we dive into CRUD operations, website redesign progress, and our weekly dev team updates. Read on to learn more!

Sculptex’s Use Case of The Week: CRUD Operations

“This week I’m gonna take a look at CRUD operations on the Züs platform

CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update and Delete, the fundamentals of any file storage platform. I’ll briefly discuss how Züs handles each of these plus highlight some Züs specific features.

Each of these operations also includes a commit option. This adds a commitment to the blockchain to have permanent reference to this file. Useful for evidence in auditing, NFTs, etc. (However committing each transaction does slow down operations a little).

What they all have in common is that they will require authorization by a wallet, (and in turn an active allocation already attached to that wallet, with sufficient tokens locked in a pool for the appropriate read or write task in hand).

Create (Writes)

So this is an upload operation, and on the client (user) device, the file is split into appropriate chunks to serve each of the Blobbers already defined for that particular allocation. These can be done in parallel, so if the client machine has good bandwidth, this can result in a significant performance increase over uploading a single large file to a single server or cloud provider, as each connection is often throttled at a maximum rate.

Some of the Züs specific upload features include:

• streaming upload option (incrementally upload chunks at a time), this is good for live streaming data or perhaps transactional data.
• encrypt if you want to keep your files private (but still be able to share with specific people via PRE if required).
• thumbnail if you want to have a thumbnail image representation of your file that can be downloaded without downloading the whole file.

(There are a few other options e.g. relating to video streaming but I’ll save them for another time)

Reads

So reads are basically download operations. The client requests chunks from a majority of the blobbers and is able to reconstruct the file as soon as the requisite number of data chunks are received. Again, as per upload, this can perform many times faster than downloading from a single server or cloud provider. Some of the Züs specific features include:

• partial download if you have a large file that only a subset is required. A good example of this is video streaming and in fact, this was the key feature I utilized when creating the first video streaming demo.
• thumbnail as per upload, you can just download a thumbnail, useful for larger media files.
• authtickets, as mentioned previously, you can download from an authticket which is a share of a file or folder.

Update & Delete

The update basically translates into a write operation, overwriting previous content while deleting is just as you’d expect. Each of these also has the commit option if required.

One of the underlying features of the storage platform is the verification of files using merkel trees plus an sha1 file hash of each file. This can be used to check if a file has changed since first uploaded by comparing it with the hash of a local copy instead of having to download the file and compare. This can be the basis of a backup procedure etc.

Most of these features can be tried out on our explorer if you want to get a feel for how the platform works.”